Vyhľadávanie
Ján Vilikovský: Poetry has always been the domain of mystery, of the magic of words. To quote a poet: "A poem should always contain something unexplained and inexplicable." With its stress on rationality, the modern age seems to militate against this unwritten principle. Do you think that modern poetry of recent decades has been able to accomplish this mission of creating a space for imagination, freedom of thinking, "making sense of nonsense"?
Milan Rúfus: Every age moves in its own particular direction, has its own myths with which it leans on its contemporaries. But usually an authentic author does not unreservedly swim with the stream. Quite the contrary. In spite of his youth, Jiří Wolker knew "that a poet has been sent here / to be whatever the earth needs, / to be its bread, if it moans from hunger, / to be its hunger, if it is in glut." The poet is usually the speaker of the hunger of the age, not the herald of its surfeit. That is why his life is seldom easy.
And so for me the tantalizing enigma is rather the indecipherable timetable according to which a great author appears (or not, as the case may be) in a community. Someone who does not care much about the tendencies and pressures of the times and with a suicidal obstinacy does whatever should be done. And leaves it to the future to explain to those of little faith why it was necessary to do it.
Ján Vilikovský: Reading your reflections on poetry, art and society ("The Life of the Poem and the Poem of Life", Život básne a báseň života, publ. by Literárne informačné centrum, Bratislava, 2002) one cannot help noticing that almost from the very beginning you stand apart, do not join the great mass movements, that you march to a different drummer. Do you indeed find it true that a great writer (great both morally and by his art) has to be at variance with his age and society? Your age seems to have liked choosing you as its opponent, even enemy. Looking back today, was it not at least in part because you, too, gave no quarters to the age?
Milan Rúfus: After all those years, allow me to answer your question in a lighter tone. (Even if there were times when I certainly did not feel like joking.) But with all that distance, now quite considerable, I should like to view my past situation in the form of a light-hearted paradox.
Sporting fans know the oft-quoted proverb about Dame Fortune who likes to execute her revenge on the butterfingers who failed to take up the opportunity she offered. If you do not score, your opponent will. In my time, I, too, failed to score on the scale of what was authoritatively demanded from poets by the powers that were. And so they scored against me -- by rapping my knuckles.
It is an absolutely simple and reliably operating rule. And so -- ’Erewego, ’Erewego. Although literature, with hindsight, warns -- Better go some other way.
Ján Vilikovský: Being the type of poet you are, you could not but be fascinated by the questions of language. You empathise with Hviezdoslav, who had to exert himself in an uphill struggle with a literary language in statu nascendi. Today, we have moved ahead, and even if not as rich as more developed literatures, we are immeasurably richer than at his time. The language, then, has grown up. Do you think our literature has grown with the language?
Milan Rúfus: Well, yes -- this did happen to us, and more than once. A genius appeared in our midst, and the community had not a literary language sufficient for his robust scope. Ján Hollý, Janko Kráľ, Hviezdoslav. It is the stigma of our history.
But the opposite may also happen: the community has not only a sufficient, but overabundant language, and yet no genius arrives. This brings me to the assumption that there is no mechanical mathematical relationship between the state of the language and the miraculous act of literary creation.
We have experienced the former case, and it still hurts, even as a reminiscence.
The latter, however, is not exclusively our concern.
Ján Vilikovský: Hviezdoslav -- today, alas, mostly underrated -- was one of those giant figures who seem to take upon their shoulders the responsibility for their whole community, its language, myths and consciousness. Usually one has to pay a heavy toll for this; he did. We could name others: Ján Hollý, Ján Smrek, in a sense also Laco Novomeský. (Last but certainly not least, Ján Kollár, still somehow problematic, as if we could not forgive him calling Slovak "a language of grooms.") Is this fate the highest mission of a poet (one could almost say "the mission, calling and curse")?
Milan Rúfus: The age-old metaphor of Prometheus is still valid: the gods go on jealously guarding their creative fire and wreak vengeance on the mortals for every stolen spark. And it seems to me that where art is concerned, the guard of the gods is more watchful than ever. In the past, a Prometheus or two somehow managed to slip past the watchdogs. But our age keeps its eyes peeled for a Prometheus. And so instead of the divine light what begins to prevail in art is the technocracy of man’s cleverness. And art begins to be replaced by intellectual games. Because ours is once again a time of bread and circuses.
The poet, however, having arrived by decree of fate, must -- from the beginning of poetry to this day -- play for the highest stakes, the all or nothing of fate -- his and ours. And so his life is no bed of roses; he is rather a naked babe among their thorns.
Ján Vilikovský: When discussing Michal Gáfrik’s monograph on Martin Rázus, in spite of all the satisfaction one could sense in your words a certain undertone of doubt -- a scepticism that is rare in a man with such a positive attitude to things. How do you see the development in the next ten or twenty years? As far as the material aspect of culture is concerned, are we not sliding back (because that is the impression one sometimes gets) to the times before the birth of Czechoslovakia?
Milan Rúfus: I have the impression that we are sliding backwards, with our eyes fixed on the "bright tomorrows".
Slovak Cinderella has got a little sister. The creators of our present called her Culture. I do not know where they got such a strange exotic name. But this is an age of strange words and strange intentions. Only the inability to govern is our own. Native. There was no time or place for us to learn such a craft. Man perfects his every activity by performing it. And we did not have many opportunities to enjoy the pleasures of power. Fragmented, alone, each in his own neck of the woods, we wandered through history, which sniggered behind our backs. And now, all too suddenly, there it is all before us: history, and we in it.
In spite of everything, I stubbornly hope that we learn whatever we do not know before our present bungling gets misused by someone else – someone better versed in the tricks of that complex menagerie of the species homo sapiens.
Because one cannot live without hope. Without faith in life you won’t live to see tomorrow. Maybe not even tonight.
And so I hope.
